UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor: Investigate the Possibility that Israel is Committing the Crime of Genocide Against the Palestinian People

Seventy years of Israeli Jewish supremacy, genocide, ethnic cleansing, wars, sieges, mass incarceration and numerous discriminatory laws — all aimed at the very destruction of the Palestinian people — should have given enough clues that Israel was never a democracy to begin with. The Jewish Nation-State Law is merely the icing on the cake.

Albert Einstein, along with other Jewish luminaries, including Hannah Arendt, had a letter published in The New York Times on December 4, 1948. That was only a few months after Israel had declared its independence and as hundreds of Palestinian villages were being demolished after their inhabitants were expelled. The letter denounced Israel’s newly founded Herut party and its young leader, Menachem Begin… In the letter, Einstein and his co-signatories described Herut (“Freedom”) as a “political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to Nazi and fascist parties.”

… On April 19, Israel celebrated its independence day. The “Nazi and fascist” mentality that defined Herut in 1948 now defines the most powerful ruling class in Israel. Israel’s leaders speak openly of genocide and murder, yet they celebrate and promote Israel as if it was an icon of civilization, democracy and human rights.

This is despite the fact that the UN’s own definition of genocide would incriminate Israel. Additionally, Israel has maintained its Jewish supremacy against the “demographic threat” posed by the Palestinian people through a violent military occupation, punctuated by episodes of all-out wars against the Gaza Strip. It describes these episodes as “mowing the lawn”, a sanitised expression that erases the indiscriminate violence against the two million mostly-civilian refugees trapped in one of the most densely populated areas in the world. Myanmar stripped the Rohingya of their citizenship in 1982, and has since engaged in episodic attacks against this community, repeatedly forcing them to flee into neighboring countries, with harrowing stories of murder, rape and torched villages. Myanmar’s official position is that the Rohingya are originally from Bangladesh, and it refers to them as “Bengalis,” just as Israel would have the Palestinians be “southern Syrians,” (as Golda Meir put it) or “Jordanian,” and refers to them as “Arab,” rather than Palestinian.

State involvement in the pilfer of Palestinian food illustrates that we shouldn’t reduce the issue to individual consumption. It’s a systematic effort to validate settler colonisation.

It’s no shock, then, that Palestinians and their neighbours get salty whenever hearing the phrase “Israeli hummus.” Using Arabic food as a symbol of Zionist identity hands over the day-to-day victuals of the native to the coloniser. It’s a project of erasure, a portent of nonexistence, a promise of genocide.

No state that destroys olive groves and poisons the environment has a right to claim the objects of sustenance harvested for centuries by other people.

Just recently, Ecuadorian envoy to the United Nations, Horacio Sevilla was adamant in his comments before a UN session, marking November 29 as the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. After he rejected “with all our strength the persecution and genocide [unleashed by] Nazism against the Hebrew people,” he added, “But I cannot remember anything more similar in our contemporary history than the eviction, persecution and genocide that today imperialism and Zionism do against the Palestinian people”. Sevilla was not comparing ideologies per se – Zionism vs. Nazism – but rather the practical implications of these political ideologies: Eviction (as in ethnic cleansing), persecution and genocide.

… The Ecuadorian diplomat’s comparison is not new, but is an echo of a constant stream of criticism of Israel, its military practices and its political ideology, namely Zionism. Yet in most, if not all, of these instances, there is yet to be an open, intelligent discussion, involving Israeli itself, regarding the applicability of such comparisons.

Two years ago, he condemned Israel’s offensive in Gaza. He described it as a “new, repugnant form of fascism” in a column for the Cuban communist party newspaper titled Palestinian Holocaust in Gaza. “Why does the government of [Israel] think that the world will be impervious to this macabre genocide that is being committed today against the Palestinian people?” he wrote.

In the same year Castro signed an international pro-Palestine manifesto which demanded that Israel respect United Nations resolutions. This included the withdrawal of all Israeli troops and settlers from the occupied Palestinian territories in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.